Make Nandroid Backups Without Rebooting Your Android Phone

Nandroid Backups are really important as they save your ass while you keep changing the ROMs on your device. I like trying out new ROMs as and when they are released but backing up data using an app like Titanium Backup and restoring it later would cost you some pain and extra work. You do not have any alternative either because the ROM may not function properly if there is no data wipe. Sometimes, it would function properly but leads to force close of some apps or your phone may suffer with low memory issues.

This makes nandroid backups very essential. All you need to do is reboot into recovery, select the ‘backup and restore” option and then select backup. This makes a complete carbon copy of your device’s data, boot.img, cache and android_secure. After installing a custom ROM, you can go to the same menu and select the option “restore”>”advanced” and select “data” to restore all data that existed on your device on the previous ROM.

However, to create a nandroid backup, you need to turn off your phone and reboot into recovery, select a few options and create the backup which may sometimes take 4-5 minutes. In this duration, you may have missed some calls or an important message resulting in you checking your voicemails or receiving the messages after a few hours.

Online nandroid backup is a method that can be followed to prevent all these hassle and creating nandroid backup WITHOUT turning your phone off. This would also be of great help to noobs who don’t know much to operate in the recovery mode. Let us see how:

This tool backups /boot (from version 5) , /recovery (from version 5) , /wimax (from version 5) , /appslog (from version 5) , /system , /data , /cache , /datadata (from version 5) ,.android_secure & sd-ext (from version 3) partitions to /sdcard/clockworkmod/backup directory. The date format used for folder name is the same used by CWM itself and nandroid backups created with this tool can safely be restored using CWM. If you would want to have a custom name for backup folder, pass an argument with the name to the script and it will use the name.

This tool was initially created for Sony Xperia phones but now supports almost all devices.